9 Basic Techniques for Making Balloon Animals

Learn the basic techniques of making balloon animals from magician Jonas Cain in this Howcast video.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Jonas Cain and I'm here at the Veritas Theatre at the beautiful Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts. I am a magician and a balloon sculptor having performed and provided entertainment solutions for many, many years. Visit my website at www.jonascain.com. And today I'm going to be talking about making balloon animals. Once you have your balloon and you have your pump, all you have to do is to blow it up. Before you blow it up, it's a good idea to stretch the balloons out. This just makes sure that it has enough flexibility that once it's blown up, it's not going to pop.

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So, you take the nozzle of the balloon and you place it on the balloon pump. And you just pull back and forth. And it fills up the balloon. Now, it's important for most balloons to leave some sort of tail at the end. What that does is as we do the different twists and turns, is it allows the balloon to expand so it doesn't pop. Now, to tie the balloon. You just bring the nozzle end right around your first two fingers. Bring that through the loop and take your fingers out. That puts a nice knot in the balloon.

Now, the basic twist, is the pinch twist. You grab from both sides, you pinch and twist. You twist enough so that it's not going to come undone right away. And that is the pinch twist. Now, if you're making multi-bubble balloons, you can hold it against the side of your body and your arm, like so. So that the bubbles stay in place. And again, you do a nice twist, and turn here. So, those are the basic twists.

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Now, the next twist is the lock twist. Take some bubbles that you've made. Fold them in half, together. And you lock them, like so. So, that 's the pinch twist and the lock twist.

The next twist we're going to learn, is the ear twist. The ear twist - it's called the ear twist 'cause it kind of looks like an ear once it's done. What you do is you fold the bubble in half and you're going to twist it around. You'll twist it a few times to make sure it doesn't come undone. And it looks like this. So, this is the ear twist.

The other twist is the loop twist. That's when you simply loop a section of the balloon over, pinch and twist. And that looks like this. So those are some basic techniques for making some balloon animals.